Homebrew

Most of the casks that disappeared from Homebrew in the last couple of years didn’t go because the software was bad. They went because the author hadn’t paid Apple. That’s not how it’s phrased, anyway. The PR says the cask failed brew audit. The audit flags the binary as unsigned, or signed but not notarised, or signed by a Developer ID that doesn’t match the bundle. The deprecation policy gives the cask a sunset date. From the outside it looks like quality control. From the maintainer’s side, it’s a $99-a-year invoice from Cupertino. ...

If you get an error like Error: Cask 'hex-fiend-beta' definition is invalid: invalid 'depends_on macos' value: ":lion", where hex-fiend-beta can be any cask name and :lion any macOS release name, run the following command: /usr/bin/find "$(brew --prefix)/Caskroom/"*'/.metadata' -type f -name '*.rb' -print0 | /usr/bin/xargs -0 /usr/bin/perl -i -pe 's/depends_on macos: \[.*?\]//gsm;s/depends_on macos: .*//g' This strips out all depends_on macos references from installed casks. It’s a blunt instrument – you’re editing Homebrew’s metadata files directly – but it gets things working again. ...